Helping children eat well via mobile software technologies

This paper describes an Android mobile app we developed to simplify the shopping experience of participants in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which provides low-income families vouchers to purchase life-stage appropriate, nutritious foods. Our app helps alleviate the tedious and error-prone use of paper WIC vouchers by allowing participants to scan food items in the store and automatically identify if an item (including its size and quantity) is authorized for the enrolled WIC participant. In addition to serving as a shopping tool, the app also provides a platform for nutrition education through healthy tip push notifications and a gallery of easy-to-fix snack recipes that are tailored for WIC participant shopping choices and other racial/ethnic patterns in dietary preferences. This paper explains the key domain and technical challenges we faced when creating our Android app and describes how we overcame these challenges by applying data normalization, software patterns, and Agile development methods.